I love the tan.
Tan looks excellent on me, you know, and I look so good in tan.
In fact, I die to get tan.
I wait for, you know, April and May to come in so that,
you know, I can go out running and I have this beautiful brownish tan.
You're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service,
the show that gives your science questions their moment in the sun.
I'm Chavisaaj Dev and I'm at the beach in Mumbai finding out what people think about tanning
because that's what we're looking at this week.
All thanks to a question from a listener of course.
Hi, I'm Namrata and I work in Boston but currently I'm visiting India so I'm in Hyderabad right now.
My question for Proud Science is I'm an Indian who's been living in the US.
Namrata is convinced that she gets more of a tan in Boston in the USA than she does in India and she wants to know what's going on.
It is odd because it seems like the reverse of what you'd expect to happen.
India is closer to the equator, the sun is stronger.
We have longer summers, so it seems reasonable that she'd get a deeper tan back home.
But she first noticed that she was tanning more when she went out running in Boston.
So in 2024, I was on a run at about 9, 9.30 in the morning in Boston.
The temperatures would have been in late 20s, probably somewhere around 27 is what I remember,
weak memory, but that's what I remember.